


ineffable

by elfin



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-22 23:23:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19138921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elfin/pseuds/elfin
Summary: 'I was talking about you, you idiot!'





	ineffable

**Author's Note:**

> Contains SPOILERS!
> 
>  
> 
> (It's the way Aziraphale says, 'I'm sorry to hear that', in the pub, when Crowley tells him he lost his best friend. Almost as if, Aziraphale thinks he's talking about someone else....)

_‘Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.’_

 

Aziraphale looks up from where he‘s seated at his desk, books stacked in tidy piles all around him, journal open at a new page. Crowley‘s somewhere in the shop, he has been for days, since they had lunch at the Ritz and a strange conversation about birdsong as they walked back through the park. 

’I keep meaning to say,’ the angel calls out, knowing he’ll be heard. ‘I am sorry about your friend.’

After a time, a strangely discorporated voice reaches him from the direction of the back office. ‘Which friend?’

‘You said, in the pub, the reason you hadn’t gone to Alpha Centauri was that you’d lost your best friend.’

There‘s a pause, and it feels strangely loaded. If he‘s being brutally honest, it was rather a surprise to hear that Crowley even had another friend; he’d never mentioned anyone else. Not once. Not in terms that suggested anything other than general acquaintances. Then again, he hadn’t been aware that Crowley had recruited the Witchfinder Army around the same time as him. So maybe there are more secrets between them than he realises. 

He starts when Crowley’s lanky, slithering form appears in the dark between a pillar and an overloaded bookshelf. ’I was talking about you, you idiot!’

‘Oh. Oh! Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry. I hadn’t.… I mean, I wasn’t really lost. I was just temporarily misplaced.’

‘But I didn’t know that, did I? I came here to find you and found your shop - this shop - an inferno. You weren’t here. What was I supposed to think? I thought they’d killed you.’ He drops his sunglasses forward so that they sit low on his nose, looking at Aziraphale over the rims. ‘Who did you think I was talking about?’

‘I had no idea.’

‘Seriously?’

‘You’ve never actually referred to me as your… best friend. Not to me, anyway.’

‘I don’t have another friend. I’ve never needed one. Even if you claim on a regular basis not to like me, and on one memorable occasion, not to know me.’ He pushes his glasses back up his nose and snakes back into the dark.

Aziraphale, thus chastised, sits silently for a while, staring at the clean page of feint lines. He remembers with awful clarity that terrible afternoon at the bandstand, dark storm clouds overheard: the passion in Crowley’s tone, the fear…. His crazy idea about them running away together. All he could do was deny him. Deny them. 

His best friend.

He remembers too finding Crowley in the pub. It was easy to locate him, his unique presence on the earth, even with the end of it fast approaching. He was drunk, mourning. Shattered into pieces not because of the imminent apocalypse, as Aziraphale had imagined, but because he thought the angel was gone. Not just discorporated. Dead. Forever.

He gets up from his desk, books forgotten for the moment, and goes through to the back office, another room as full of books and papers as the main shop, only these aren’t for sale. First editions, many of them signed by the author, some of them priceless. One or two have sentimental value.

‘Crowley….’ He’s sitting in one of the armchairs, long legs over one of its threadbare arms, a book cradled in his hands. Reading. He doesn’t read books, by his own admission. It throws Aziraphale off balance for a moment.

‘What?’

‘What are you reading?’

He checks the cover. ‘Dangerous Liaisons.’

‘In French.’

‘First thing I picked up.’

‘Why are you reading? You don’t read.’

Crowley shrugs. ‘You seem to be able to lose yourself for weeks, months, in these things.’

‘Why do you want to lose yourself at all?’

‘What else do I have to do?’

Aziraphale finally thinks he sees the problem. ‘My dear…. We thwarted the Powers That Be, stopped the end of the world and the Earth still turns. You shouldn’t be hiding away in here, you should be out there, enjoying all the things you’ve always enjoyed.’

Crowley closes the book with purpose, forgetting to mark his page, and drops it to the wooden floor with a soft thump. He uncurls and stands up, tips his head to one side and regards Aziraphale until it starts to get weird. It makes him feel wretched, because he knows instinctively this is somehow his fault. Whatever this is.

‘Crowley. Please. Tell me what’s wrong.’ 

He says softly, ‘You still don’t get it.’ 

‘Get what?’

‘You! You’re the thing I’ve always enjoyed! I didn’t leave Earth because you wouldn’t leave with me. Without you... it would have been pointless. Without you, I was happy just to sit and get pissed, to let the war start and let everything burn because I thought I’d lost you. I want to be with you.’ He hesitates. ‘I know you love me.’

That’s an easy one. ‘Of course I love you.’

In two strides, Crowley closes up on him, leaving no more than an inch of air between them. Aziraphale stands his ground, human heart racing. 

‘Then, why...? It’s not like I haven’t offered, so many times….’

‘Gabriel and Michael,’ he stammers, ‘would not have approved.’ He goes on the defensive despite knowing it’s a lie. ‘I’m sure you’d have got a commendation for tempting an angel, a real feather -‘

Crowley shakes his head. ‘Don’t do that. You know that’s not how it would have been.’

‘But that’s how it would have looked.’ It’s a plea for understanding but even to him it sounds like a pathetic excuse. 

Behind the dark lenses of Crowley’s sunglasses, Aziraphale can see ochre eyes, dark slits blown wide. Reaching up with one tentative hand, he pushes the expensive shades carefully up into hair the colour of fire. Crowley doesn’t stop him, although he does make a weak sound of protest in the back of his throat. ‘Oh, stop. I know what you are. I saw you, remember, in the garden.’

‘My true form.’

‘No.’ He’s on firmer ground here. ‘This is you. This is the you I’ve known for six thousand years. You’re all I’ve known really, in the grand scheme of things. And I suppose the secret’s out now; my lot know about you and, thanks to Michael, your lot know about me.’

Crowley hesitantly lets his hands come up to rest somewhere around Aziraphale’s waist. ‘They tried their best and failed.’

‘So they did.’ He pauses, swallows. Crowley’s so close, so tempting. ‘Well, maybe now we might consider....’ 

Crowley kisses him. It isn’t epic, as great kisses go, but for Aziraphale it‘s a moment that transcends every other moment that’s gone before. Putting into practice what he’s seen humans doing for centuries, he brings his hands up to frame Crowley’s face and flicks the tip of his tongue inquisitively across the line of Crowley’s lips. Crowley obligingly parts them and for a while Aziraphale loses himself in something other than a book.

‘You are... beautiful,’ Crowley murmurs when Aziraphale finally takes half a step back. 

‘And you... you are magnificent.’ He knows he‘s utterly lost. As smitten as he’s been for decades, perhaps for centuries, from now on he’ll never be able to deny the two of them the way he has so often in the past. ‘Are you absolutely certain that this... that I’m what you really want?’

‘Angel, I’ve been chasing you so long I can’t remember anything else. Six thousand years is just about long enough to be sure, don’t you think?’

‘My dear, dear fellow….’ Aziraphale steps into him again, wrapping his arms around Crowley’s neck, pressing up against the tall, lithe body. Crowley in turn encircles him, drawing him closer, resting his cheek in the soft tufts of blond hair. Time has no meaning for them, except for the human constructs of mealtimes which Aziraphale is fond of observing, and it’s for an age that they stand together in each other’s arms, holding on to one another. This is something new happening directly to them, after millennia of new things happening around them, a cosmic shift in the balance of the universe. 

And for once, no one is watching.

~..~

There are tourists with photographs of Atlantis in their holiday snaps. There’s still a sherbet lemon on a shelf in the control room of a nuclear power plant in England. There’s a significant drop in the number of whaling ships operating, rumours abound about a monster living on the ocean bed. These things are wound into the fabric of reality, people accept that it was all something that happened, and at the time it was strange and exciting. But the world moves on. 

On Christmas morning, four months later, Crowley and Aziraphale drive out to Tadfield. It’s been snowing for a few hours and by rights the slim tyres of a vintage Bentley shouldn’t be able to gain traction on the white roads, but somehow they do.

They walk through the village, arm in arm. Crowley wears a long black woollen winter coat with a dark red, velvet lining. Aziraphale is in a sinfully warm sheepskin coat that he found hanging on a hook at the back of the shop one morning in early December, and thanked Crowley for in a way that made the wily demon want to buy him a great deal many more gifts in the days, weeks, years to come. 

Mr Tyler is walking his dog. He gives them a long sideways glance as they pass. Crowley can’t decide if it’s latent homophobia, or a spark of recognition, because he probably remembers the man with yellow eyes who stopped to ask him directions in a car that was on fire.

They drop off presents for Adam and the gang with Anathema and Newt. Crowley doesn’t want to go to the Youngs’ house. He’s not sure what he’d say to Mr Young after the incident at the airbase, or to Adam for that matter, after the thing with Satan, stopping all of time and everything. Best just to leave the beautifully wrapped Nerf guns with the witch and the witch finder and let one of them play Santa Claus. 

They drive back to London, and head to the Ritz for a spectacular Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, a bottle of champagne and a marvellous St Emilieon. Afterwards, they stroll home to the shop, and while it’s not snowing in the city, the air is cold with a promise of frost overnight; it’s enough to feel like Christmases should. 

Crowley conjures up a log fire in the back room, away from the books, and with a promise to keep a watchful eye on it. They open a bottle of brandy and curl up on the sofa together, making plans for the years to come; plans to travel, to invent, to do a little good and a little bad: maintain the balance.

Later, as the fire’s dying, they make love. They’re getting quite good at it. Crowley’s very inventive and Aziraphale’s surprisingly adventurous. Besides, there’s nothing they like better - they’ve discovered - than to be as wrapped up in one another physically as they are in every other way. Only when he can’t work out when one of them ends and the other starts, is Aziraphale truly happy. 

Plus, they’re ethereal beings who can inhabit each other’s bodies, so that spices things up.

The angels of Heaven and the demons of Hell leave them alone. They peek, now and again, and both sides turn away in disgust at some of the things they catch their counterparts doing. But neither side interferes, because they’ve both had the same unsettling thought. That maybe, just maybe, this strange union of Crowley and Aziraphale is part of the ineffable plan.


End file.
